And now, for something completely different: during a longer water outage, you won't be able to flush your toilet - a little-appreciated but grave hygiene risk. When living in a single-family home, you should probably get a shovel and a pickax: they are useful in the backyard either way, but if push comes to shove, such tools allow you to dig out a latrine and address the sanitation problem in a fairly sustainable way. Of course, dumping bagged human waste into trash will work for a while, too, but it quickly becomes a liability.

Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

Be in this for the long haul. Effortlessly losing 1-2 lbs per week while slowly developing better habits is far more meaningful than starving yourself for a month to get immediate but short-lived results. Get an accurate bathroom scale, take daily measurements first thing in the morning, calculate key milestones, and put it all in a spreadsheet to keep yourself honest and motivated. It will probably take 6-9 months to get the outcome you want; daily or weekly weight fluctuations are almost completely meaningless, but you should be seeing a consistent and predictable biweekly drop.

If you want to prepare for more outlandish, long-term disasters, or if you have a large family, you can make realistic plans only if you live in a single-family home. This decision alone may give you access to 50-100 gallons of water sitting in the water heater (unless it's a tankless design). Next, if you have some backyard space, you may opt for relatively inexpensive 55 gallon plastic barrels ($60), taking up about as much space a small curbside trash can. Another common option, costing about the same per gallon stored, is a 275 gallon tote ($325). Such solutions can easily provide water for an entire family for up to several months at 2 quarts per person per day, with some allowance for laundry and hygiene needs. Some preppers stockpile even more - but really, if you waited this long and the conditions are still dire, it may be high time to hit the road and find some other place to live.
For a while they became my primary source of income, and every single time I was hired by a company that catered to the survivalist market, not a traditional publisher. Each time, the company's name would be listed instead of an author. There are thousands of prepping guides available on Amazon right now— 2,849 in the "Survival and Preparedness" category alone and 4,214 matches for the keyword "prepper" across categories—and only a small percentage are produced by dedicated book publishers. Companies that sell survivalist products and services produce the lion's share, and on any given day, if you peek at freelancing sites like Upwork, you'll see at least a couple of ghostwriting projects dedicated to survivalism being advertised.
Some Geiger counters can keep track of the cumulative dose for you, but most will simply display the rate at which you are getting exposed - typically in microsieverts per hour (µSv/h) or microroentgens per hour (µR/h; for gamma radiation, 1 R/h ≈ 1/100 Sv/h). To figure out what the reading means, you need to do the math: for example, at 600 µSv/h, you will hit 100 mSv within a week, and 1 Sv within about two months. (The usual background rate from natural sources hovers around 0.1-0.2 µSv/h.)
(For folks who consume coffee or caffeinated beverages daily, and who have near-complete tolerance to caffeine, adrafinil pills can be a viable emergency choice. Adrafinil is a powerful wakefulness-promoting agent with no stimulant properties, and is not a regulated substance in the US and many other parts of the world. Note that daily long-term use carries some risk of liver toxicity and other side effects. Do your homework.)
Luckily for the survivors, the highly radioactive isotopes present in the fallout are also very-short lived; the intensity of radiation will likely drop ten-fold within 6-8 hours, and will decrease a hundred-fold within two days. If you wait a week or two, it should be quite safe to venture out. Of course, it's still best to stay indoors for as long as possible, and when heading out, it's good to keep the trips short, to wear disposable coveralls ($11), and to take care not to track any residues into your home. But you don't need to lock yourself in an underground vault.

DIY home surgeons will be excited to know epinephrine can actually be used with lidocaine (a numbing agent) to restrict blood vessels for faster wound repair. (Note: Cracked in no way condones performing self-surgery.) When sanitization resources become limited, the speed with which a wound can heal will have a drastic impact on survival rates. The longer a wound stays open and bloody, the more likely you are to get infections. Infections have historically been some of the most deadly and difficult-to-treat medical conditions, and even today they are not always easily survivable.

For the United States, the switch to fiat money came relatively late, in 1971. To stop the dollar from plunging like a rock, the Nixon administration employed a clever trick: they ordered the freeze of wages and prices for the 90 days that immediately followed the move. People went on about their lives and paid the usual for eggs or milk - and by the time the freeze ended, they were accustomed to the idea that the "new", free-floating dollar is worth about the same as the old, gold-backed one. A robust economy and favorable geopolitics did the rest, and so far, the American adventure with fiat currency has been rather uneventful - perhaps except for the fact that the price of gold itself skyrocketed from $35 per troy ounce in 1971 to $850 in 1980 (or, from $210 to $2,500 in today's dollars).

Even with adequate shelter and with limited physical activity, losing access to water means certain death after a couple of truly rotten days. Thankfully, in the developed world, this is a very uncommon fate: emergencies that leave communities without potable water are not rare, but when they happen, the government practically trips over itself to immediately restore service or to get water trucks on the road.

However, if some tales of survivalist stockpiling are to be believed, our nutty neighbors have enough of the social lubricant squirreled away to hold the most epic end-of-the-world-party of all time outside of Edgar Wright's social circle. It might not be practical, but who needs practical when you and everyone you know is doomed to die from radiation poisoning or cancer?
Then, for two hours, Andrew: just tells stories. The time he went after Jesse James’ buried treasure, the time he was held at gunpoint while prospecting for gold, the time an 8-inch centipede fell on him while caving in Japan—each story adorned with cliffhangers and near misses. Andrew: can talk. If he couldn’t, Darryl, a regular attendee, would’ve napped for longer than he did.
Lifeboat survival kits are stowed in inflatable or rigid lifeboats or life rafts; the contents of these kits are mandated by coast guard or maritime regulations. These kits provide basic survival tools and supplies to enable passengers to survive until they are rescued. In addition to relying on lifeboat survival kits, many mariners will assemble a "ditch bag" or "abandon ship bag" containing additional survival supplies. Lifeboat survival kit items typically include: